Remedy
by The Legend of Chocolate
Summary: A collection of 50 unconnected ficlets revolving around the complex relationship between a snobbish heir and a schizophrenic bookworm (whose counterpart also happens to be the friendly neighbourhood murderer). Case study: Byakuya Togami and Touko Fukawa, for the OTP and OT3 Boot Camp Challenge. Ratings, genres and time periods may vary. [Now playing: /crystal tears/, pre-canon.]
1. -50- paper scars

**Ficlet count| **1/50**  
Prompt| **50. hush**  
Rating| **T**  
Genre(s)| **Drama**  
Pairing| **Byakuya Togami & Touko Fukawa**  
Done for| **The OTP and OT3 Boot Camp Challenge (Anime and Manga Fanfiction Challenges forum)  
**Published|** October 10 2013**  
A/N|** This is a drabble/one-shot collection, so we still have 49 unconnected ficlets to go - some angsty, some humorous - all with (mostly) different writing styles and themes. Will (hopefully) be updated regularly.  
**Disclaimer| **I do not own Dangan Ronpa.

* * *

**paper\scars**  
[50:hush]

i.

The scars will never fade, and neither will their memories. Even as hope gradually infiltrates the fog of despair, as the group of six dissolves into a single pair, the bookworm and the heir will never forget the academy that tested their resistance to the allure of freedom through murder.

* * *

ii.

The first time pain sears its way across her finger, it's all she can do to avert her eyes frantically from the thin splotch of crimson blossoming to life against alabaster skin, black spots haphazardly fizzing in and out of her vision.

Her shaky voice wavers through the air in a shudder. "B-Byakuya-sama... I-I need your help..."

But the arrogant blonde heir remains motionless, maintaining a rigid posture as his eyes fix upon the weatherbeaten book in his hands, and she's left to gingerly lower a band-aid upon the spot she thinks the cut is (she doesn't dare to look at it).

* * *

iii.

The second time, she's careless. Labelled "Super High-School Level Literary Girl", one would think she's in her natural habitat, wielding a fatally sharp pen tipped with the power to create and destroy whole universes — but no, even a bestselling novelist isn't immune to paper cuts.

Inexorably, she finds her gaze wandering to where he lounges in his chair, as he does every day. It's years after they escaped from the academy, and he already has it all, slowly sewing the fragile scraps of a destroyed world back into a vestigial ghost of its previous resplendence. The Togami Group has once again swept across the globe, just as he swore it would.

And she's happy for him. Really.

(She just wishes as she dabs at the cut welling up with _youknowwhat_ that he'd answer her tentative calls of "Byakuya-sama" just once, to acknowledge that this is all real and they're alive and she isn't just a waste of space.)

* * *

iv.

The fifty-seventh time, a memory comes flying back.

The girl with eggplant hues in her hair gazes unflinchingly as the menacing corner slices its way across blotted skin, another addition to the existing tapestry of curling vines and slanted edges displayed prominently on her skin in varying tones of red ink.

She isn't afraid of blood; not anymore. She lives a treacherous day-to-day life propped up on a tightrope between fantasy and reality, and as her pen skims across the paper, a divine scribe turning words into hypnosis that leaves some speechless and others breathless, she's revelling in her element.

As her fingers fly to work their magic, butterfly wings fluttering in the breeze, she remembers — a jolt of electricity that sends her mind whirling and an involuntary shriek escaping her lips.

The heir turns around then, eyebrows furrowed into a deep scowl. "What _now_?"

And even after she stutters a lame _sorrysorrysorry_ that comes out sounding far too feeble to have any impact whatsoever — after he frowns his murderous _I'llkillyouafterthisbook_ frown and returns to his tome — her heart is still ricocheting.

(She remembers the academy, darkness, and a time before Despair.

She remembers pale skin, paper scars and a silent scream.

She glances over at his hardened façade of steel and remembers that even the most arrogant of people have weaknesses.)

* * *

v.

She writes. He reads. It's a quiet synchronisation of movements that require no words to be said, only shown. It provides her a pleasant respite from the painfully joyous memories before Despair; it allows him to blend into fiction and dream of turning back time.

They hide their paper scars from themselves.

* * *

_-Next prompt: peppermint-  
__[in which Togami's pre-canon life is explored, and this sadistic author completely and utterly butchers his first meeting with Fukawa]_


	2. -49- crystal tears

**Ficlet count| **2/50**  
Prompt| **49. peppermint**  
Rating| **T**  
Genre(s)| **Friendship/Hurt/Comfort**  
Pairing| **ToFu  
**Universe|** pre-canon; semi-AU**  
Done for| **The OTP and OT3 Boot Camp Challenge (Anime and Manga Fanfiction Challenges forum)  
**Published|** October 20 2013**  
A/N|** This is a one-shot, not a drabble like the previous ficlet. Romance and fluff will definitely come into play in later chapters, but apparently not now.  
**Disclaimer| **I do not own Dangan Ronpa.

* * *

**: crystal tears :**  
[49:peppermint]

They meet in a hurricane of honking traffic and irksome plebeians and rain streaking crystalline paths down pallid skin, twisting and intertwining with angst-ridden tears into a dark symphony.

She is broken, a porcelain china doll dashed to the ground and left lying in shattered fragments, at the mercy of a cruel world that drew scars in ink across her brittle surface and cut deeper to her hollow insides.

He is emotionless, a stone wall clinging tenaciously to the cold bitterness of winter even as spring rustles abound, and interlocking mass of mycelium-esque scars embedded beneath the lavish surface.

They stare at each other for several long moments, brilliant cyan eyes scanning her tousled aubergine hair and overall dishevelled appearance while ash-grey ones find his impeccable façade, fragile glue sewing together the boy on the verge of falling apart.

Surprisingly, she breaks the silence first, raising a trembling hand to hang limply in front of her as if she isn't quite sure what to do with it. "I-I'm Touko. Touko Fukawa."

With a placid disposition to complete the image, she almost seems like a mouse to him, hesitantly extending a hand to a stranger who obviously feels nothing but distaste toward her - but her body shudders, peppermint-breath dissolving into wispy swirls in the cold December air, and her hand is still there, pale and freezing and in desperate need of company, someone who shares her predicament. Rather like him, in fact.

It's out of pity - _for her, or himself?_ - that his hand finds itself reluctantly creeps up to enfold hers, holding it tentatively as a tendril of mist would wrap around the ankles of one plodding through a field in the wee hours of the morning, and his reply is brief, forced and lucid; it's the only tone he's known how to speak in all his life."Byakuya. To-" He catches himself on his surname. As a child of a multibillionaire, he knows far better than to indulge a mysterious commoner who reeks of _commonness_. "Tori. Byakuya Tori." He smoothly smothers his identity in a lie, and her ash-eyes flicker too infinitesimally for him to decide if she caught onto his deceit.

Two rain-drenched children, escaping briefly from reality and into a far-from-a-fairytale world of their own.

Their story begins with rain.

* * *

"Do you ever feel that... n-no one cares?" She buries her head in her salient sailor uniform skirt, unusually lengthy and cascading in swathes of byzantium purple to engulf her legs, which she's always kept hidden from him.

He's much too interested in his foreign surroundings to pay attention to her, a simple annoyance that is the spawn of the elusive female species. Paint blottered with mould and fungi peel from the dilapidated walls splattered with incongruous graffiti he fails to make any sense out of, and shadows dance to the beat of the torrential downpour, playing a guileful game of hide and seek with the feebly lit streetlamps as various insects scuttle across the cold cobblestones for cover - but he does turn to regard her indifferently. It's an eventual process, though.

"Occasionally." He cocks his head to the side, listening impassively to the raindrops slamming against the sidewalk, sheets of metal finding their mark in hard rock. It's been too long since he's been outdoors, different sounds intermingling in his ears and falling in heaps of meaningless jargon instead of spattering onto the windowpane and disrupting his silent reading.

It's been too long, he realises, since it last hit him how lonely he really was, cooped up in his steel towers with his future already inscribed on destiny's papyrus.

* * *

They're different, he soon discovers. Much more different than he originally assumed they were.

At first glance, she's a mouse sculpted from glass, thin, quaking and frail, of such insubstantial essence that had they not accidentally collided that fateful day in the rain, she would've slipped past his critical gaze. She carries herself with an enervated slightness, scuttling from place to place hurriedly and furtively as if attempting to distract as much attention from herself as possible, and is the exact opposite of his ingrained superior air and lofty poise and eyes of barren steel that reveal nothing and absolutely nothing about their owner, simply because of his upbringing. Integrated into a royal battlefield since birth, competition reigned supreme among the fifteen potential heirs, all nursing a thirst for power that overruled any sibling bonds they could've held.

Since birth, he's been taught to _hold your chin up, darling, and raise your nose high, because all they are is worthless scum of the earth lucky to kiss the dust beneath your feet._ He's the youngest, after all; the underling, a lowly place which never in the history of the Togamis won the fight for the throne.

And she? As far as he's concerned, she's nothing but scum. Weakness personified. Scum, perhaps, that harbours a mutual desire for the respect and comfort and _solidarity _they both deserve.

(Scum that cries itself to sleep.

Scum that somehow worms itself into his arms.)

* * *

On good days, her eyes are crystal and her breath is laced with peppermint; on bad days, her eyes are orbs the colour of slush and he catches whiffs of putrid must. Good days are when he manages to tiptoe his way out of the house to their rendezvous (for the tranquil serenity the commonness provides, of course, not _her_) and she isn't smearing snot on his freshly dry-cleaned jacket; bad days are when he catches her with a knife in her hand, and alleyway odour lingers noticeably enough when he returns home to merit a stroke of the cane.

On good days, she tentatively takes his short blond hair and twines it around her slim fingers, scrutinising his stoic face warily for any signs of disdain (there hardly is any, though), and it's just the two of them against the universe; on bad days, she's there physically but away emotionally. She's been bullied, he dimly registers in the descending twilight, and still is. Ostracised, he hazards a guess, watching her cocoon herself in a brilliant mind lost to the loneliness of fantasy. Probably abused both physically and verbally, judging by the scars staining her wrists and the way she instinctively flinches when acerbity slips off his tongue. He honestly couldn't care less, but his heart gives the slightest twinge as he watches her drown in her own imagination.

He decides he prefers good days.

* * *

One day, he catches her with ribbons of red drawn on her arms.

In that moment, taking in the lifelessness of her closed eyelids, her blanched-white face contorted in agony, and the crimson rivulets swirling down chalky skin, his breath hitches in his throat, his heart skips a beat, and the rest of the world fades away as he stumbles like a drunkard across the room, his vision flickering precariously between black and white and he's swimming in despair because she's slipping fast and her silent scream of GOODBYE WORLD I HATE YOU is dying on her cracked thistle lips and she's not dying, no, not without his permission, not like this, not as a fragile paper doll clutched in his numb fingers, not with a razor dripping carmine sprawled on the ground beside her, not when his first task as a candidate for the title of heir is mere months away-

* * *

It's the first time Byakuya Togami comes undone, _really_ comes undone as the marionette strings of his meticulously orchestrated façade unravel to reveal the darkness beneath his quintessential superficiality, then unwind further to reveal the quivering of his fingers, the rapid thudding of his heart, and fear caked under neatly trimmed fingernails.

None of the sterile bandages shrouding her scars from view will ever erase that haunting scene etched into his mind.

* * *

He returns much later than he usually would that night, only to see smouldering eyes and barely concealed rage.

"Where were you?" his mother hisses, voice hard, dripping venom of a cobra, hardly giving him time to respond as the whip snakes out and slaps a familiar narrow line of red across his arm. After all he's been through, it takes years of cultivated dispassion to hold the pathetic scraps of himself together, and his world explodes in excruciating agony as it strikes again, again and again, in a raucous cacophony of _snapsnapsnap_ that rings incessantly in his ears, embedding marks into his skin much as _she_ has done to herself.

She - she, not _she_ - seizes his arm with the garroting hold of a python, and self-control barely manages to suppress his innermost hatred and resentment that simmers within. "I asked _where - were - you_?"

_Snap. Snap. Snap._

"Outside." The general word escapes his lips cloaked in a thin veil masking his defiance, more as a result of pain than submission.

_Snap. Snap. Snap._

"You are turning ten in _two months_. Your previous accomplishments in the stock market in your childhood are decent, yes - not many six-year-olds can pull off a legitimate success in placing bets _and_ reaping profits from it - but the entire group will be, no, _is_ closely surveying your every move to see how long you can keep this tomfoolery up!" Bitterness sneaks out and ensnares her words as they fall over him in a cold shower, a direct slap to his face that cuts far deeper than any crack of the whip. _Group_, because the word _family_ is far too personal in the Togami hierarchy of fame to be used. _Decent_, because their expectations of him have been raised too high for his fleeting success to be considered _impressive_.

"You should be focusing on things of greater importance - such as _academics_!" _Snap._ "Aesthetics, perhaps, or even athletics!" _Snap._ "Simply being born into a group worth billions of dollars does not equate to the world revolving around you, Byakuya Togami, as much as you would like to believe so!" _Snap._

_Just kill me already. You obviously don't want me around, and I hate this world, so just let me die, die, DIE-_

His mother's face, dark and carved from anger, is dangerously close to his, their aquiline noses mere inches apart. Peppermint traces the path of her breath, colder and harsher than Fukawa's has ever been, and he marks it as his nemesis the instant it wafts into his nostrils.

"I expect nothing less than the best from you, Byakuya Togami."

_Of course you do, Mother. Everyone does._

He quells the retort on the tip of his tongue, and instead spits out a hollow, daunting, "Yes, Mother."

If she catches the virulent poison edging the two simple words, hears the pure hate hovering ominously in the air as he stalks off to his room and slams the door with a thunderous thud of finality, she doesn't haul him back for another spanking.

* * *

_Touko Fukawa._ It is the name of the girl who has a potential monarch in the palm of her hand, but doesn't know it. She singlehandedly commands his marionette strings, and in her hands, he is porcelain, brittle and vulnerable but never glass; opaque, and never laid out for all to see. She doesn't know how much power she has over him, and he'll never tell her now, will he?

It's been days, even weeks since he put a halt to his nightly visits to their secret rendezvous. In a strange, twisted way, he does miss her, miss her acrid scent and her dainty china doll demeanour and the way they are _so alike_ even when they aren't-

-but he is Byakuya Togami, a prince of darkness caged within his steel towers, not the white knight she desires, and he is left to stain his immaculate pillows with crystal tears reminiscent of the cold raindrops that brought them together and left them a dysfunctional disarray as meaningless and incongruous as the graffiti on the decrepit alley walls, until even the transparent tears that ran free turn to stone and drench him in eternal opaque nigrescence.

And so their story ends with rain, a bitter irony born from puerile fantasy and dashed dreams, and even as he watches his siblings fall one by one at the hand of the shrewd intelligence that is the youngest Togami, nothing could be more bleak.

* * *

_-Next prompt: flag-  
[in which this ficlet is briefly continued, 7 years into the future]_


End file.
